4elements, web design and consultancy

Pushover is one of my favorite services over the past few years; it makes it easy and inexpensive for developers to send push notifications to iOS and Android devices without having to develop their own application.

While a number of front-end app developers integrate with Pushover, e.g. IT, I find it most useful as a developer for receiving notifications related to my own applications and web servers. For example, I've integrated Pushover into my Simple Monitoring application to alert me to website failures as well as sending twice daily heartbeat notifications when nothing is wrong. If MySQL fails or my DNS goes down, I'll receive a speedy alert to my iPhone.

Similarly, I integrated Pushover into SimplifyEmail to send notifications when emails with specific keywords arrive such as "urgent" or from specific senders such as "Tom McFarlin" (Envato's Code editor).

Here's what Pushover alerts look like on your phone:

Pushover offers a variety of sounds to customize notifications and it also supports user-configurable quiet hours, so you don't have to be woken up in the middle of the night unless you want to be:

Here's an example of Simple Monitor's list of my checks which trigger different Pushover notification sounds:

My TestAll method, called by cron, processes each of the user-configured tests. If there is a failure, it notifies each registered device. If there is no failure, it determines whether it's time to resend a heartbeat notification, letting me know the monitor is still up and running:

As a developer, I've found Pushover to be tremendously useful for delivering notifications in the absence of a dedicated mobile application. To me, Pushover's mobile app is like a SysAdmin dashboard that I didn't have to build. But it's also great for sending notifications for important emails or other server events. It's also fun to prank your friends if you can get hold of their user tokens and device names; but I would never do that.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoy using Pushover as much as I have. If you'd like to explore alternative services to Pushover, check out Boxcar and Panacea. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Please post any comments, corrections, or additional ideas below. You can browse my other Tuts+ tutorials on my author page or follow me on Twitter @reifman.